ARS VIVA! CLOSES SEASON WITH A FULL SOUND, FLASH OF FUTURE

Dan Tucker, Special to The TribuneCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The Ars Viva! Orchestra under Alan Heatherington wound up its 1999-2000 season Sunday on a satisfying high point.

The orchestra gave its ringing best to two substantial works of Robert Schumann. And in the Chopin F Minor Concerto, Elizabeth Joy Roe, a high school senior who has won a fistful of prizes, proved herself something more than a contest winner. She played like an artist to be taken seriously.

Schumann's opera "Genoveva" has never earned many points as an opera, but its overture is pure Schumann--dramatic, richly textured, alternating between gloom and triumph. It sticks too close to formula to rank as a masterly work, but with this orchestra it came close to sounding like one.

Under Heatherington's deft baton, their playing was transparent, supple and shaded.

The Chopin work--labeled Concerto No. 2, though in fact it was written first--is pure youthful genius, bubbling over with too many ideas to fit into a standard form. Roe showed something of the same quality.

From the piano's opening notes, her playing had the confident sound of a musician who knows exactly what she wants to do with a piece and also knows she can do it. Roe did not so much play the opening movement as let it unfold at its own unhurried pace.

The second movement, Chopin's lace valentine to a fellow-university student who didn't know she was being wooed, sang all the way through. And the third had the glancing, darting sound of mischief.

What may be most impressive about Roe's playing is that the brilliant looping arpeggios of this concerto, which usually sound like pasted-on decorations, seemed to be structural parts of the music.

The Schumann Symphony No. 4 in D minor showed off the curious ability of this orchestra to sound twice as big as it is, probably because you hear what everyone's playing. Schumann's dramatic effects are sometimes overdone, like brow-smiting Victorian melodrama.

But most of the symphony, the last two movements especially, are splendid music.

Heatherington knit it all together into a living, moving whole--the plaintive, folk-song tune of the second movement, the pleasantly wheedling triplet patterns of the scherzo, the chest-thumping march of the finale.

When Schumann forgot about literature and musical politics and just wrote in his mother tongue of music, he wrote it splendidly. In this performance, at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie the orchestra proved that. The evening is worth remembering till the next season for Ars Viva!